The Aqua Net Diaries (21 page)

Earlham College's Barrett Hall

I'm worried about Friday. I don't know what to wear. I don't know how to act, and most of all, I don't know how
they
will act. I only wish we could be going out with Richard (Gere) and Mikhail (Baryshnikov) instead. But we can always dream, right?

—Holly Ogren to Jennifer, on the eve of their first date with college boys

Hether Rielly, Holly Ogren, Sara Ansel, and I started lurking around Earlham College second semester junior year. I was the one who first said, “I'm tired of high school boys.”

Hether said, “Me too. They're so … high school.”

I said, “Why don't we go over to Earlham and look at the boys over there?”

Holly said, “We could watch a game—soccer, lacrosse, football. That way it's not so obvious.” Holly's dad worked at Earlham like mine. She was aware of the need for sneakiness.

We started going to Earlham lacrosse games. Hether drove us over and we sat in the stands and cheered on the Quakers. Richmond wasn't always tolerant of Earlham or its students. There was this overall view that Earlham kids were tree-hugging, granola-eating hippies, and a lot of them were, but we didn't mind. That semester we found them exotic. And the lacrosse players had really great legs. They didn't look like boys, either. They looked like men.

We became lacrosse groupies. We met Bill, with the hooded eyes, who Hether fell hard for. “He makes me feel like I'm in a rocket heading for the sun,” she said. “Get it? He makes me hot!” We met his friend Tim, with the darkly curling hair and high cheekbones. We all swooned a bit over him, and no one was sure which of us, if anyone, he liked. We were content just being near him.

We became their friends. They looked for us at games and we hung out afterward, sometimes in the student union, sometimes in Barrett Hall, which was their dorm. They introduced us to a soccer player, Shane, who radiated a languid ease—a kind of sexy peace-love vibe that was just so
cool.
He looked like a surfer-boy hippie, tan and golden, big brown eyes, long gold-brown hair that just brushed his shoulders and fell down over his eyebrows so that he was always tossing it aside.

In Creative Writing class one day, in the midst of Mr. Dunaway's lecturing and Tommy Wissel trying to steal my shoe, Sara and Hether and I planned our futures. Sara and Tim would live in a small English Tudor home in a valley
with horses, an Irish setter, and two children. Hether and Bill would own a large ranch house and have three boys and three girls (Hether came from an enormous family and was used to having lots of people around). Shane and I would live in Los Angeles in a bungalow high in the Hollywood Hills and have maybe one child (a girl) or maybe just cats.

We hung out once, the group of us, piling into Hether's car—Bill and Tim and Hether and Sara and Shane and me. Shane and I sat in the back and Hether and Sara were carrying on, being silly and stupid, acting like they were in high school. Sara was making fun of retarded people, not really meaning it, and Hether was laughing. I suddenly felt self-conscious because they sounded young. I could feel a spotlight shining down through the roof of the car on the three of us and it said,
Alert: High School Girls! High School Girls!
I thought of the bungalow in the Hollywood Hills and my face started burning.

Beside me, Shane had gone rigid. He said, “You know, my sister's retarded.”

Hether and Sara went silent. Then they started backtracking. “We were just having fun.” “We weren't being serious.” “We would never actually make fun of retarded people.”

Afterward I asked Shane if it was true. “Is your sister really retarded?”

“No,” he said.

“Shane!”

“Man, I just couldn't stand the way she was talking. It wasn't cool.” And then he told me, “Look, I think you're cool. I like you. But I don't like your friends. I want to hang out with you, but not with them.”

So I began to go over to Earlham by myself. Sara and Hether went over a few times without me to watch some
lacrosse games. Hether and Bill started dating, and not long after Sara and Holly stopped visiting Earlham altogether. I spent time with Shane on my own. He took me up to the attic of Barrett Hall, which was off limits to students, but which was where everyone who lived in Barrett Hall hung out anyway. There was old bedding up there, and a boom box that was always playing Bob Marley, UB40, and other reggae music. We climbed up there and listened to music and sat on the floor or on the big exposed pipe that ran the length of one wall, and we talked.

At first we kissed and made out a little and my head swam from Shane, from the heady mix of Barrett Attic and Earlham and older men and the exotic nature of it all. I was out of my element and we both knew it.

He put the brakes on things quickly. He told me he thought I was cool, but he needed to cut it off. I was in high school—two years younger. We were in totally different places and he was very conscious of that. If I'd been a freshman in college, he said, he would have pursued me, but in his mind I was off-limits.

At first I was disappointed, but I wanted to get to know him and I wanted to be his friend. So we hung out in Barrett Attic and talked about life. I told him I planned to be a writer and an actress in New York. These weren't things I shared with most people, especially boyfriends. But he wasn't my boyfriend. He didn't go to the high school. He didn't know any of my friends. Because the barriers were down, I felt I could tell him anything. And he listened. He took everything to heart.

Every now and then we ventured down from the attic. We went to Sunsplash at Earlham—the annual reggae festival. Afterward, someone dropped us off at my house, since
Shane didn't have a car and I didn't drive. My mom was out of town so only my dad was home. Shane was barefoot and shirtless, dressed in boxer shorts and a big floppy hat. We sat downstairs in my basement, him drunk as a skunk, me sunburned and happy from the day. We were sitting close beside each other on the couch but not doing anything. My dad came downstairs and said to Shane, “It's late. It's time to go home. Do you want a ride?”

My dad was polite but firm. It was the most polite I'd ever seen him with a boy.

Shane looked up at my dad and said, “No, sir. Thank you.”

My dad stood there, waiting.

Shane got up, hat flopping, bare feet, and walked up the stairs. I followed him. Outside it was pouring rain. I said, “Dad!”

He said, “It's late,” in a tone that meant no arguing.

Shane opened the front door and the rain poured down in buckets. The sky was black. He stepped out in his bare feet and boxer shorts and said “See you later” to me. And he walked off into the night.

I thought about asking Shane to the Junior-Senior Prom, but didn't. Somehow I knew he didn't belong at a high school dance. Besides, there was something about my friendship with Shane that I wanted to keep to myself, locked away in Barrett Attic. It was just for him and me, not for my friends at school to look over and dissect. There was no telling how long I would have kept hanging out there.

I showed up at the attic one day unannounced and surprised him with his girlfriend—a girl he'd just started seeing. She was a college girl, unlike me. I tried to smile and laugh and act like it didn't matter, and he was cool and I
was cool, and everything was
cool.
We went up to the attic once or twice after that, but I had gotten my feelings hurt. He hadn't done anything wrong. We were just friends. But I hadn't realized until that moment that I liked him so much. I couldn't get the image of him with her out of my mind. I stopped coming around.

School ended and Mom and I went to New York for the summer. I just disappeared. When I got home, the Barrett Boys and Barrett Attic were a thing of the past, nothing but a bittersweet memory.

Taking advantage of the variety of clubs offered this year, some students perfected their card skills in a friendly game; others learned more about business, geology, sports, trivia, language; others moved about taking pictures or refereeing elementary sports; and then there were those who chose not to participate in clubs but preferred using the time instead to catch up on studies, sleep, or gossip.

The newly revised speech team: Front row—Eric Ruger, Robert Ignacio, Jennifer McJunkin, Hether Rielly, Beth McDougall, Joe Kraemer, Ronnie Stier; Back row—Ross Vigran, Ian Barnes, Ned Mitchell, Danny Dickman, Tom Dehner, Larry Peterson

Never had a speech team accomplished so much. Truly, never had human potential reached such staggering heights. For RHS, it was a proud moment.

—1986
Pierian

In the days when the Richmond High School speech team was at its best, when we were bringing back trophies and ribbons at every meet, when each team member was a winner, we got up early for meets on Saturday mornings while
all the rest of Richmond was sleeping. The dozen or so members of the team—a tired, unglamorous bunch—would assemble at school and climb yawning onto a school bus. It was still dark outside and usually cold. Mary Boots was our coach; she was a woman with a frizzy perm, a kind heart, and a talent for getting the best from us. She worked us hard. Her son Stan was copresident of the team with me. I thought he was in love with me until he invited Joey to the ballet in Ohio, and Joey said his mom wouldn't let him go because Stan meant for it to be a date.

In the dark, we set out for Rushville, Connersville, New Castle. We were the biggest school of any of them, but we never hosted meets. My old boyfriend Eric Lundquist was on the team. My mom came along sometimes, too, to chaper-one and help coach.

We had a rowdy cheer we sang to wake ourselves:
Beer, beer for old Richmond High! Bring in the whiskey, bring in the rye! Send Mrs. Boots out for gin, and don't let a single sober person in! We never stumble, we never fall, We sober up on wood alcohol, When we die we'll go to Hell, we're the devils of Richmond High! Rah! Rah! Rah!

Before each round of competition, I locked myself in a bathroom stall and did little breathing exercises my mom had taught me. I got myself so worked up before I went on that I couldn't eat, and I turned pale and even ran a fever. But once I got up in front of everyone and started performing, I loved it. Afterward, I wanted to run screaming through the halls. I was so full of myself that I couldn't be stopped.

In the poetry category, I read from Edgar Lee Masters's
Spoon River Anthology
and won almost every time. I also competed in prose, reading “The October Game” by Ray Bradbury, which was a mean little short story about a father
who cuts up his daughter at a Halloween party and passes her around to the other guests in the dark. I read it very sweetly, standing up at the front of the room in my plaid skirt and corduroy blazer and lip gloss, and it was always fun to see the judges' faces when I delivered the last cruel lines. I won with that one, too.

Sophomore year, Stan and I were each awarded the highest degree possible—that of excellence from the National Forensic League, which meant that we had earned more than 250 points apiece and received the ruby insignia. It was kind of like the Academy Award for high school speech. No one at Richmond High cared very much—to them the speech team barely existed—but I knew I was a speech team rock star.

At the end of our sophomore year, Mrs. Boots told us she was moving away because her husband had been offered another job. We got a new coach—Brenda Frazier-Christie, who looked almost exactly like Mrs. Boots only black. Joey and I took it upon ourselves to hold elections for speech team president. No one ran except the two of us, who, naturally, ran together as copresidents.

In room 81, where we practiced every day after school, we gave a speech to the few remaining speech team members—the ones who hadn't abandoned ship when Mary Boots left. Mrs. Frazier-Christie wasn't there because she rarely showed up for practices.